The Taxpayers' Alliance's digital debt clock passes the Treasury on Whitehall in April. The group is being advised by Freedom Works, a powerful Washington organisation. Photograph: Geoff Caddick/PA

British anti-tax campaigners are taking advice from leaders of the rightwing
Tea Party movement
in the US in a bid to import the mass-protest techniques that have seen a million activists march on Washington DC to call for lower taxes and smaller government.

The Taxpayers' Alliance, an influential campaign group that calls for tax cuts and low government spending, is being advised by Freedom Works, a powerful Washington organisation credited with helping to destabilise the Obama administration through its mobilisation of 800,000 grassroots activists.

Libertarian US Tea Party organisations attended a conference in London today to share tactics with British and European taxpayer lobby groups, and described their activities as "an insurgent campaign" against their government's tax and spending policies.

The move reflects an increasing desire within rightwing circles to establish a British version of the Tea Party "uprising", and a growing belief that expected union action against the coalition government's programme of cuts could be harnessed to mobilise vocal counter-demonstrations. The Taxpayers' Alliance also believes that public anger at the Revenue & Customs blunder that has left 1.4m people facing backdated tax bills could fan the flames of a wider anti-tax revolt.

"You could say our time has come," said Matthew Elliott, founder of the TPA, which has seen its supporter base rise 70% to 55,000 in the last year. "Take the strikes on the London underground this week and how much they annoyed and inconvenienced people. Couldn't we get 1,000 people to protest that?

"We need to learn from our European colleagues and the Tea Party movement in the US ... It will be fascinating to see whether it will transfer to the UK. Will there be the same sort of uprising?"

Elliott said that the HMRC blunder could fuel protests. "When the envelopes [from HMRC] hit the doormats there will be a lot of fury," he said, "not least because a lot of people won't be able to pay it."

The Tea Party movement – named after the anti-tax Boston Tea Party protest of 1773 – emerged last year, partly in protest at the US bank bailout, and has been championed by Sarah Palin, the former Republican vice-presidential candidate. It claims to have mobilised more than one million voters against the government through dozens of local groups. Freedom Works is organising a second mass protest outside the White House this weekend.

Terry Kibbe, a consultant at Freedom Works, which claims to convene 800,000 activists, told the Guardian she wants to help mobilise otherwise cerebral political institutions in the UK and Europe by helping them create grassroots activist wings.

Behind the Tea Party movement are a series of well-financed and well-established rightwing lobby groups who pay for TV adverts, campaign materials and supply training for local grassroots chapters.

"We have been working to identify groups in Europe that would be amenable to becoming more activist-based, thinktanks that could start activist wings," said Kibbe. "We have worked with the Taxpayers' Alliance, in Austria and in Italy, and we want to do more."

Freedom Works trains Tea Party activists in running mass demonstrations and provides access to bespoke-designed software to allow activists to set up powerful computer networks that would otherwise be too expensive. It has also published an activist manual and will shortly issue a "Rules for Patriots" booklet.

Americans for Prosperity, another Tea Party group which claims to have 1.5m activists and is headed by oil billionaire David Koch, was also represented at the London conference, and helped fund it.

"In the US there is a growing consciousness of the effect of government spending and debt on their own prosperity," said Tim Philips, president of AFP. "It strikes me that many Britons are coming to the same conclusion."

AFP is one of several US thinktanks that have sought to disrupt the Obama presidency by opposing healthcare reform, stimulus spending, and cap-and-trade legislation on carbon emissions.

Other leading US rightwing thinktanks that financed the conference include the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation, the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation. Conservative MPs Peter Lilley and Robert Halfon spoke at the event, which was also attended by representatives from Philip Morris and Imperial Tobacco, the Global Warming Policy Foundation – a climate change-sceptical thinktank led by Lord Lawson – and BP.

"We need to reach out to a broader audience," said Barbara Kohn, secretary-general of the Hayek Institute in Vienna, which is one of Europe's leading low tax campaigners and has also been advised by Freedom Works. "We need to come from various angles. We have all seen what our friends in the Tea Party movement, and their march, have achieved."

What remains uncertain is whether British and European people are likely to mobilise in the same numbers as their US counterparts.